19 February 2007

Bit of a scare yesterday to see a photo of Meinhardt Raabe on the front page of the New York Times under the headline “Cause of Death: Crushed by Farmhouse.” Ten years ago, Oz fans learned that Raabe and his wife had been in a car accident, and she didn’t survive. More recently, another former MGM Munchkin was hurt in a tractor accident. So I first thought Raabe himself had been killed. The headline turned out to be a supposedly wry allusion to Raabe’s cinematic role in declaring the Wicked Witch of the East sincerely dead.

I thought Dan Barry’s profile of Raabe (perhaps only available to Times Select subscribers), while laudatory, didn’t reflect his lifelong go-getting initiative. Raabe not only worked as the Oscar Mayer spokesperson “Little Oscar,” but he created that role to make a place for himself in business. Too short to serve in the US armed forces in WW2, he became a Civil Air Patrol pilot, training men for those forces. So of course he’d still be granting interviews to the Times at age 91. He does, after all, have a book out. (See my earlier comments about it.)

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About the Author

J. L. BELL is a writer and reader of fantasy literature for children. His favorite authors include L. Frank Baum, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. He is an Assistant Regional Advisor in the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators, and was the editor of Oziana, creative magazine of the International Wizard of Oz Club, from 2004 to 2010.

Living in Massachusetts, Bell also writes about the American Revolution at Boston 1775.